In recent years, it is increasingly demanded that a copyright of contents be protected. As an increasing trend in response to the demand, contents distributed in digital terrestrial broadcasts and the like include a right information. When the contents are recorded on a storage medium, the right information has to be recorded together with the contents.
The right information includes such important informations for protecting the copyright as availability/non-availability of migration, availability/non-availability of copy, availability/non-availability of reproduction, number of migrations/copies/reproductions, and the like. It becomes increasingly necessary for the contents to be handled based on the respective informations in different devices.
As a conventional method of notifying a contents user of the right information of the contents in association with the contents was proposed an information processing device (for example, see No. 2002-312522 of the Publication of the Unexamined Japanese Patent Applications) in which data of the right information of the relevant contents (whether or not the right information is included, whether or not the right information can be migrated, number of remaining checkouts and the like) is recorded in a right information storing unit, the data is associated with respective music titles in a GUI unit, and an icon corresponding to the data of the right information is displayed on a display so that the user can be notified of conditions for using the contents.
In recent years, it is increasingly promoted to encrypt the right information of the contents and retain the encrypted right information in an authenticated memory region of a recoding medium for retaining the right information of the contents only accessible after a mutual authentication is obtained in order to enhance the protection of the copyright.
Therefore, when the right information is displayed together with the contents and other information of the contents to the users of the respective devices, it becomes necessary to obtain the mutual authentication relative to the storage medium, read the encrypted right information from the authenticated memory region and decode the encrypted right information every time when the right information of the contents is acquired. The foregoing conventional method included such problems that it requires a large amount of time for the user to be notified of the right information and the user is disadvantageously kept waiting until the right information is displayed when the right informations of a plurality of contents are collectively displayed.